Tis but a rumour, but we need to be vigilant
This PM, this govt, have neither scruples nor shame
Jonathan Sumption: Boris Johnson “is putting forward ideas which are essentially those of a fanatic”
Sumption is, or at least was, a conservative, who wrote speeches for the late Keith Joseph
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/jonathan-sumption-boris-johnson-is-putting-forward-ideas-which-are-essentially-those-of-a-fanatic
The former Supreme Court judge says we are in a situation with no constitutional precedent
....
. The situation in his view has arisen.
“mainly because we adopted, on a question of really fundamental importance, a technique of decision-making - namely a referendum, which is purpose built to circumvent the political process.
We are therefore not in a very good position to complain that the political process isn’t working well!
Obviously it isn’t, and the reason is that MPs - who for the most part perfectly well understand the damaging consequences of withdrawing from the EU, especially without a deal - nevertheless still feel bound by the outcome.”
The mistake was to use a plebiscite in a parliamentary system.
< what I keep saying >
Two forms of democracy are competing and one is struggling to accommodate the other.
“That is the fundamental feature of the political situation: we are now in a conflict between two competing sources of legitimacy.”
All this means that MPs are “disabled from performing their proper function of deciding what is in the national interest.
But above all, they are disabled from performing the essential function of any political system,
which is to accommodate opposing interests and opinions, and arrive at a result which maybe would have been no one’s first choice, but which everybody can live with.”